Artists circa 1960 broke through the limits imposed on them by the art institutions. Art became more, more than an object, more than a representation however minimal. It became an idea, a message and a way of communicating.The artists involved took advantage of the human mind and imagination as well as the receptiveness of the body and brain.

The initial motivation to breakdown the existing context became overwhelming and necessary for many artists in the 1960’s. These artists not only burst the bubble of an elitist, turgid art world through the dematerialisation of the art object, but also broke open the confining contexts of the art viewer.

Thinking about the origins of language and about pictorial language such as the Egyptian hieroglyphs. I found this stone with distinctive markings. I traced out the shapes of the marks and then made three small lino cuttings each of them with two of the shapes from the stone and a surrounding border . I printed iterations of the lino cuttings in black and gold on a length of chinese paper.   I think it looks very effective coming from a simple idea and technique. I intentionally left the uniformity of the line of printing to the judgement of my eye as I did not want it to be rigidly marked out. The fact that the shapes are framed in each lino cutting seems key to the fact that this works along with the use of iteration.   

'I think art is about communication or a conversation with the viewer, and I credit the viewer as being pretty smart. I don’t think you have to spell everything out. You can allude to something and they can fill in the blanks.' 

Monika Grabuschnigg’s  ceramic works struck a chord with me and I was interested to read the article quoting her as having said  “As little kids, we build things out of mud, sand, or toy blocks, and with that, [we] start to understand our surroundings,” she said. “Then we enroll in school and everything becomes flat, the mud and dirt are gone, and the horizon of our imagination shrinks”.        

Personally I feel very strongly about this and I believe we lose a lot by entering into a stagnant, mono language academic system. I feel that the main language we use: english, is overused and inefficient in itself to cover all the aspects that we try to use it within.

Interestingly the constant reiteration of writing the same line seems to cause my mind to quite and my ego to move aside. Maybe there is an opportunity to embody humility through the act of repetition. A lot of the motivation for change in the 1960's was about creating more equanimity and breaking down the hierarchical systems of the time. So it is unsurprising that many artists methodologies and artwork content like iteration, ready mades and instructions art reflected the social movements of the day.